Question

I have the following method in a python module which takes all default arguments, and generates a SQL query from those arguments in the following way:

Wondering, if there is a better (and elegant and pythonic) way to generate the above SQL query

def myquery(arg1=None, arg2=None, arg3=None):
    query = "SELECT column FROM table WHERE"
    params = []
    if arg1 is not None:
        query = query + " arg1 = " + arg1
        params.append(arg1)

    if arg2 is not None:
        if params is not None:
            query = query + "AND arg2 = " + arg2
        else:
            query = query + " arg 2 = " + arg2
        params.append(arg2)

    if arg3 is not None:
        if params is not None:
            query = query + "AND arg3 = " + arg3
        else:
            query = query + " arg 3 = " + arg3
        params.append(arg3)
    return query

Answer 1

If i was gonna do this without an ORM I would do something like

def QueryWhere(table,where={}):
    params = ["%s=?"%key for key in where.keys()] #take advantage of builtin query placeholders (?)
    c = db.cursor()
    c.execute("SELECT * FROM %s WHERE %s"%(table," AND ".join(params)),where.values())
    return c.fetchall()

print QueryWhere("users",{"name":"johndoe","pass":"1c4$g"}) 

something like that anyway … I would also recommend looking into using an ORM